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With Compliments of 



A College Fetich 



UNIVERSITY PRESS: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 



AN ADDRESS 

DELIVERED BEFORE 

€l)c ^arfcara Chapter 

OF THE 

FRATERNITY OF THE PHI BETA KAPPA, 

IN SANDERS THEATRE, CAMBRIDGE, 
June 28, 18S3. 



By CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Jr. 









" 



r* 



BOSTON: 
LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 

NEW YORK: 

CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM. 

1883. 



LCiou 



A* 



Copyright, 1883, 
By C. F. Adams, Jr. 



dambrfogc : 

PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON. 
UNIVERSITY J'RESS. 



ADDRESS. 



I AM here to-day for a purpose. After no little hesitation 
I accepted the invitation to address your Society, simply 
because I had something which I much wanted to say; and 
this seemed to me the best possible place, and this the most 
appropriate occasion, for saying it. My message, if such I 
may venture to call it, is in nowise sensational. On the con- 
trary, it partakes, I fear, rather of the commonplace. Such 
being the case, I shall give it the most direct utterance of 
which I am capable. 

It is twenty-seven years since the class of which I was a 
member was graduated from this college. To-day I have come 
back here to take, for the first time, an active part of any 
prominence in the exercises of its Commencement week. I 
have come back, as what we are pleased to term an educated 
man, to speak to educated men ; a literary man, as literary 
men go, I have undertaken to address a literary society; a 
man who has, in any event, led an active, changeable, bustling 
life, I am to say what I have to say to men, not all of whom 
have led similar lives. It is easy to imagine one who had 
contended in the classic games returning, after they were over, 
to the gymnasium in which he had been trained. It would 
not greatly matter whether he had acquitted himself well or ill 
in the arena, — whether he had come back crowned with vie- 



4 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

tory or broken by defeat : in the full light of his experience of 
the struggle, he would be disposed to look over the old para- 
phernalia, and recall the familiar exercises, passing judgment 
upon them. Tested by hard, actual results, was the theory of 
his training correct ; were the appliances of the gymnasium 
good ; did what he got there contribute to his victory, or had 
it led to his defeat? Taken altogether, was he strengthened, 
or had he been emasculated by his gymnasium course? The 
college was our gymnasium. It is now the gymnasium of our 
children. Thirty years after graduation a man has either won 
or lost the game. Winner or loser, looking back through the 
medium of that thirty years of hard experience, how do we 
see the college now? 

It would be strange, indeed, if from this point of view we 
regarded it, its theories and its methods, with either unmixed 
approval or unmixed condemnation. I cannot deny that the 
Cambridge of the sixth decennium of the century, as Thack- 
eray would have phrased it, was in many respects a pleasant 
place. There were good .things about it. By the student who 
understood himself, and knew what he wanted, much might 
here be learned ; while for most of us the requirements were 
not excessive. We of the average majority did not under- 
stand ourselves, or know what we wanted : the average man of 
the majority rarely does. And so for us the college course, 
instead of being a time of preparation for the hard work of 
life, was a pleasant sort of vacation rather, before that work 
began. We so regarded it. I should be very sorry not to 
have enjoyed that vacation. I am glad that I came here, and 
glad that I took my degree. But as a training-place for youth 
to enable them to engage to advantage in the struggle of life, 
— to fit them to hold their own in it, and to carry off the 
prizes, — I must in all honesty say, that, looking back through 
the years, and recalling the requirements and methods of the 
ancient institution, I am unable to speak of it with all the re- 
spect I could wish. Such training as I got, useful for the 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 5 

struggle, I got after, instead of before graduation, and it came 
hard ; while I never have been able — and now, no matter how 
long I may live, I never shall be able — to overcome some great 
disadvantages which the superstitions and wrong theories and 
worse practices of my Alma Mater inflicted upon me. And 
not on me alone. The same may be said of my contem- 
poraries, as I have observed them in success and failure. 
What was true in this respect of the college of thirty years 
ago is, I apprehend, at least partially true of the college of 
to-day; and it is true not only of Cambridge, but of other 
colleges, and of them quite as much as of Cambridge. They 
fail properly to fit their graduates for the work they have to 
do in the life that awaits them. 

This is harsh language to apply to one's nursing mother, 
and it calls for an explanation. That explanation I shall now 
try to give. I have said that the college of thirty years ago 
did not fit its graduates for the work they had to do in the 
actual life which awaited them. Let us consider for a moment 
what that life has been, and then we will pass to the prepara- 
tion we received for it. When the men of my time graduated, 
Franklin Pierce was President, the war in the Crimea was just 
over, and three years were yet to pass before Solferino would 
be fought. No united Germany and no united Italy existed. 
The railroad and the telegraph were in their infancy ; neither 
nitro-glycerine nor the telephone had been discovered. The 
years since then have been fairly crammed with events. A 
new world has come into existence, and a world wholly unlike 
that of our fathers, — unlike it in peace and unlike it in war. 
It is a world of great intellectual quickening, which has ex- 
tended until it now touches a vastly larger number of men, in 
many more countries, than it ever touched before. Not only 
have the nations been rudely shaken up, but they have been 
drawn together. Interdependent thought has been carried on, 
interacting agencies have been at work in widely separated 
countries and different tongues. The solidarity of the peo- 



6 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

pics has been developed. Old professions have lost their 
prominence ; new professions have arisen. : Science has ex- 
tended its domains, and superseded authority with bewildering 
rapidity. The artificial barriers — national, political, social, 
economical, religious, intellectual — have given way in every 
direction, and the civilized races of the world are becoming 
one people, even if a discordant and quarrelsome people. We 
all of us live more in the present and less in the past than we 
did thirty years ago, — much less in the past and much more 
in the present than those who preceded us did fifty years 
ago. The world as it is may be a very bad and a very vulgar 
world, — insincere, democratic, disrespectful, dangerous, and 
altogether hopeless. I do not think it is ; but with that thesis 
I have, here and now, nothing to do. However bad and hope- 
less, it is nevertheless the world in which our lot was cast, and 
in which we have had to live, — a bustling, active, nervous 
world, and one very hard to keep up with. | This much all 
will admit; while I think I may further add, that its most 
marked characteristic has. been an intense mental and physical 
activity, which, working simultaneously in many tongues, has 
attempted much and questioned all things. 

Now as respects the college preparation we received to fit 
us to take part in this world's debate. As one goes on in life, 
especially in modern life, a few conclusions are hammered into 
us by the hard logic of facts. Among those conclusions, I 
think I may, without much fear of contradiction, enumerate 
such practical, common-sense and commonplace precepts as 
that superficiality is dangerous, as well as contemptible, in that 
it is apt to invite defeat; or, again, that what is worth doing at 
all is worth doing well ; or, third, that when one is given 
work to do, it is well to prepare one's self for that specific work, 
and not to occupy one's time in acquiring information, no 
matter how innocent or elegant, or generally useful, which has 
no probable bearing on that work; or, finally, — and this I 
regard as the greatest of all practical precepts, — that every man 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 7 

should in life master some one thing, be it great or be it small, 
so that thereon he may be the highest living authority : that 
one thing he should know thoroughly. 

How did Harvard College prepare me, and my ninety-two 
classmates of the year 1856, for our work in a life in which 
we have had these homely precepts brought close to us? In 
answering the question it is not altogether easy to preserve 
one's gravity. The college fitted us for this active, bustling, 
hard-hitting, many-tongued world, caring nothing for authority 
and little for the past, but full of its living thought and living 
issues, in dealing with which there was no man who did not 
stand in pressing and constant need of every possible prepara- 
tion as respects knowledge and exactitude and thoroughness, 
— the poor old college prepared us to play our parts in this 
world by compelling us, directly and indirectly, to devote the 
best part of our school lives to acquiring a confessedly super- 
ficial knowledge of two dead languages. 

In regard to the theory of what we call a liberal education, 
there is, as I understand it, not much room for difference of 
opinion. There are certain fundamental requirements, without 
a thorough mastery of which no one can pursue a specialty to 
advantage. Upon these common fundamentals are grafted 
the specialties, — the students' electives, as we call them. The 
man is simply mad, who in these days takes all knowledge for 
his province. He who professes to do so can only mean 
that he proposes, in so far as in him lies, to reduce super- 
ficiality to a science. 

Such is the theory. Now what is the practice? Thirty 
years ago, as for three centuries before, Greek and Latin were 
the fundamentals. The grammatical study of two dead lan- 
guages was the basis of all liberal education. It is still its 
basis. But, following the theory out, I think all will admit 
that, as respects the fundamentals, the college training should 
be compulsory and severe. It should extend through the 
whole course. No one ought to become a Bachelor of Arts 



o A COLLEGE FETICH. 

until, upon these fundamentals, he had passed an examination, 
the scope and thoroughness of which should set at defiance 
what is perfectly well defined as the science of cramming. 
Could the graduates of my time have passed such an exami- 
nation in Latin and Greek? If they could have done that, I 
should now see a reason in the course pursued with us. When 
we were graduated, we should have acquired a training, such 
as it was; it would have amounted to something; and, hav- 
ing a bearing on the future, it would have been of use in it. 
But it never was for a moment assumed that we could have 
passed any such examination. In justice to all, I must admit 
that no self-deception was indulged in on this point. Not only 
was the knowledge of our theoretical fundamentals to the last 
degree superficial, but nothing better was expected. The re- 
quirements spoke for themselves ; and the subsequent exam- 
inations never could have deceived any one who had a proper 
conception of what real knowledge was. 

But in pursuing Greek and Latin we had ignored our mother 
tongue. We were no more competent to pass a really search- 
ing examination in English literature and English composi- 
tion than in the languages and literature of Greece and Rome. 
We were college graduates; and yet how many of us could 
follow out a line of sustained, close thought, expressing our- 
selves in clear, concise terms? The faculty of doing this should 
result from a mastery of well selected fundamentals. The 
difficulty was that the fundamentals were not well selected, and 
they had never been mastered. They had become a tradition. 
They were studied no longer as a means, but as an end, — the 
end being to get into college. Accordingly, thirty years ago 
there was no real living basis of a Harvard education. Honest, 
solid foundations were not laid. The superstructure, such as it 
was, rested upon an empty formula. 

The reason of all this I could not understand then, though it 
is clear enough to me now. I take it to be simply this : The 
classic tongues were far more remote from our world than they 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 9 

had been from the world our fathers lived in, They are much 
more remote from the world of to-day than they were from 
the world of thirty years ago. The human mind, outside of 
the cloisters, is occupied with other and more pressing things. , 
Especially is it occupied with a class of thoughts — scientific 
thoughts — which do not find their nutriment in the remote 
past. They are not in sympathy with it. Accordingly, the 
world turns more and more from the classics to those other and 
living sources, in which alone it finds what it seeks. Students 
come to college from the hearthstones of the modern world. 
They have been brought up in the new atmosphere. They are 
consequently more and more disposed to regard the dead 
languages as a mere requirement to college admission. This 
reacts upon the institution. The college does not change, — 
there is no conservatism I have ever met, so hard, so unrea- 
soning, so impenetrable, as the conservatism of professional 
educators about their methods, — the college does not change; 
it only accepts the situation. The routine goes on, but super- 
ficiality is accepted as of course ; and so thirty years ago, as 
now, a surface acquaintance with two dead languages was the 
chief requirement for admission to Harvard ; and to acquiring 
it, years of school life were devoted. 

Nor in my time did the mischief end here. On the contrary, 
it began here. As a slipshod method of training was accepted 
in those studies to which the greatest prominence was given, 
the same method was accepted in other studies. The whole 
standard was lowered. Thirty years ago — I say it after a care- 
ful search through my memory — thoroughness of training in 
any real-life sense of the term was unknown in those branches 
of college education with which I came in contact. Every- 
thing was taught as Latin and Greek were taught. Even now, 
I do not see how I could have got solid, exhaustive teaching in 
the class-room, even if I had known enough to want it. A 
limp superficiality was all pervasive. To the best of my recol- 
lection the idea of hard thoroughness was not there. It may 
be there now. I hope it is. 



IO A COLLEGE FETICH. 

And here let me define my position on several points, so that 
I shall be misunderstood only by such as wilfully misunder- 
stand, in order to misrepresent. With such I hold no argu- 
ment. In the first place I desire to say that I am no believer 
in that narrow scientific and technological training which now 
and again we hear extolled. A practical, and too often a mere 
vulgar, money-making utility seems to be its natural outcome. 
On the contrary, the whole experience and observation of my 
life lead me to look with greater admiration, and an envy ever 
increasing, on the broadened culture which is the true end and 
aim of the University. On this point I cannot be too explicit; 
for I should be sorry indeed if anything I might utter were 
construed into an argument against the most liberal education. 
There is a considerable period in every man's life, when the 
best thing he can do is to let his mind soak and tan in the 
vats of literature. The atmosphere of a university is breathed 
into the student's system, — it enters by the very pores. But, 
just as all roads lead to Rome, so I hold there may be a modern 
road as well as the classic avenue to the goal of a true liberal 
education. I object to no man's causing his children to ap- 
proach that goal by the old, the time-honored entrance. On 
the contrary I will admit that, for those who travel it well, it is 
the best entrance. But I do ask that the modern entrance 
should not be closed.! Vested interests always look upon a 
claim for simple recognition as a covert attack on their very 
existence, and the advocates of an exclusively classic college- 
education are quick to interpret a desire for modern learning, 
as a covert attack on dead learning. I have no wish to attack 
it, except in its spirit of selfish exclusiveness. I do challenge 
the right of the classicist to longer say that by his path, and 
by his path only, shall the University be approached. I would 
not narrow the basis of liberal education ; I would broaden 
it. No longer content with classic sources, I would have the 
University seek fresh inspiration at the fountains of living 
thought; for Goethe I hold to be the equal of Sophocles, and 



A COLLEGE FETICH. II 

I prefer the philosophy of Montaigne to what seem to me 
the platitudes of Cicero. 

Neither, though venturing on these comparisons, have I any 
light or disrespectful word to utter of the study of Latin or of 
Greek, much less of the classic literatures. While recognizing 
fully the benefit to be derived from a severe training in these 
mother tongues, I fully appreciate the pleasure those must have 
who enjoy an easy familiarity with the authors who yet live in 
them. No one admires — I am not prepared to admit that any 
one can admire — more than I the subtile, indescribable fineness, 
both of thought and diction, which a thorough classical educa- 
tion gives to the scholar. Mr. Gladstone is, as Macaulay was, 
a striking case in point. As much as any one I note and de- 
plore the absence of this literary Tower-stamp in the writings 
and utterances of many of our own authors and public men. 
But its absence is not so deplorable as that display of cheap 
learning which made the American oration of thirty and fifty 
years ago a national humiliation. Even in its best form it 
was bedizened with classic tinsel which bespoke the vanity 
of the half-taught scholar. We no longer admire that sort of 
thing. But among men of my own generation I do both ad- 
mire and envy those who I am told make it a daily rule to 
read a little of Homer or Thucydides, of Horace or Tacitus. 
I wish I could do the same ; and yet I must frankly say I 
should not do it if I could. Life after all is limited, and I 
belong enough to the present to feel satisfied that I could 
employ that little time each day both more enjoyably and 
more profitably if I should devote it to keeping pace with 
modern thought, as it finds expression even in the ephemeral 
pages of the despised review. Do what he will, no man can 
keep pace with that wonderful modern thought ; and if I must 
choose, — and choose I must, — I would rather learn some- 
thing daily from the living who are to perish, than daily muse 
with the immortal dead. Yet for the purpose of my argu- 
ment I do not for a moment dispute the superiority — I am 



12 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

ready to say the hopeless, the unattainable superiority — of 
the classic masterpieces. They are sealed books to me, as they 
are to at least nineteen out of twenty of the graduates of our 
colleges ; and we can neither affirm nor deny that in them, and 
in them alone, are to be found the choicest thoughts of the 
human mind and the most perfect forms of human speech. 

All that has nothing to do with the question. We are not 
living in any ideal world. We are living in this world of to- 
day; and it is the business of the college to fit men for it. 
Does she do it? As I have said, my own experience of thirty 
years ago tells me that she did not do it then. The facts 
being much the same, I do not see how she can do it now. It 
seems to me she starts from a radically wrong basis. It is, 
to use plain language, a basis of fetich worship, in which the 
real and practical is systematically sacrificed to the ideal and 
theoretical. 

To-day, whether I want to or not, I must speak from indi- 
vidual experience. Indeed, I have no other ground on which 
to stand. I am not a scholar; I am not an educator; I am 
not a philosopher; but I submit that in educational matters 
individual, practical experience is entitled to some weight. 
Not one man in ten thousand can contribute anything to this 
discussion in the way of more profound views or deeper in- 
sight. Yet any concrete, actual experience, if it be only sim- 
ply and directly told, may prove a contribution of value, and 
that contribution we all can bring. An average college gra- 
duate, I am here to subject the college theories to the practical 
test of an experience in the tussle of life. Recurring to the 
simile with which I began, the wrestler in the games is back at 
the gymnasium. If he is to talk to any good purpose he must 
talk of himself, and how he fared in the struggle. It is he who 
speaks. 

I was fitted for college in the usual way. I went to the Latin 
School ; I learned the two grammars by heart ; at length I 
could even puzzle out the simpler classic writings with the aid 



A COLLEGE FETICH. I 3 

of a lexicon, and apply more or less correctly the rules of con- 
struction. This, and the other rudiments of what we are 
pleased to call a liberal education, took five years of my time. 
I was fortunately fond of reading, and so learned English 
myself, and with some thoroughness. I say fortunately, for in 
our preparatory curriculum no place was found for English; 
being a modern language, it was thought not worth studying, 
— as our examination papers conclusively showed. We turned 
English into bad enough Greek, but our thoughts were ex- 
pressed in even more abominable English. I then went to col- 
lege, — to Harvard. I have already spoken of the standard of 
instruction, so far as thoroughness was concerned, then pre- 
vailing here. Presently I was graduated, and passed some 
years in the study of the law. Thus far, as you will see, my 
course was thoroughly correct. It was the course pursued by 
a large proportion of all graduates then, and the course pur- 
sued by more than a third of them now. Then the War of the 
Rebellion came, and swept me out of a lawyer's office into a 
cavalry saddle. Let me say, in passing, that I have always felt 
under deep personal obligation to the War of the Rebellion. 
Returning presently to civil life, and not taking kindly to my 
profession, I endeavored to strike out a new path, and fastened 
myself, not, as Mr. Emerson recommends, to a star, but to the 
locomotive-engine. I made for myself what might perhaps be 
called a specialty in connection with the development of the 
railroad system. I do not hesitate to say that I have been 
incapacitated from properly developing my specialty, by the 
sins of omission and commission incident to my college train- 
ing. The mischief is done, and so far as I am concerned is 
irreparable. I am only one more sacrifice to the fetich. But 
I do not propose to be a silent sacrifice. I am here to-day to 
put the responsibility for my failure, so far as I have failed, 
where I think it belongs, — at the door of my preparatory and 
college education. 

Nor has that incapacity, and the consequent failure to which 



14 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

I have referred, been a mere thing of imagination or sentiment. 
On the contrary, it has been not only matter-of-fact and real, 
but to the last degree humiliating. I have not, in following 
out my specialty, had at my command — nor has it been in my 
power, placed as I was, to acquire — the ordinary tools which 
an educated man must have to enable him to work to advantage 
on the developing problems of modern, scientific life. But on 
this point I feel that I can, with few words, safely make my 
appeal to the members of this Society. 

Many of you are scientific men ; others are literary men ; 
some are professional men. I believe, from your own personal 
experience, you will bear me out when I say that, with a single 
exception, there is no modern scientific study which can be 
thoroughly pursued in any one living language, even with the 
assistance of all the dead languages that ever were spoken. 
The researches in the dead languages are indeed carried on 
through the medium of several living languages. I have ad- 
mitted there is one exception to this rule. That exception is 
the law. Lawyers alone, I believe, join with our statesmen in 
caring nothing for " abroad." Except in its more elevated and 
theoretical branches, which rarely find their way into our courts, 
the law is a purely local pursuit. Those who follow it may 
grow gray in active practice, and yet never have occasion to 
consult a work in any language but their own. It is not so 
with medicine or theology or science or art, in any of their 
numerous branches, or with government, or political economy, 
or with any other of the whole long list. With the exception 
of law, I think I might safely challenge any one of you to name 
a single modern calling, either learned or scientific, in which a 
worker who is unable to read and write and speak at least Ger- 
man and French, does not stand at a great and always recurring 
disadvantage. He is without the essential tools of his trade. 

The modern languages are thus the avenues to modern life 
and living thought. Under these circumstances, what was the 
position of the college towards them thirty years ago? What 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 1 5 

is its position to-day? It intervened, and practically said then 
that its graduates should not acquire those languages at that 
period when only they could be acquired perfectly and with 
ease. It occupies the same position still. It did and does 
this none the less effectually because indirectly. The thing 
came about, as it still comes about, in this way: The col- 
lege fixes the requirements for admission to its course. The 
schools and the academies adapt themselves to those require- 
ments. The business of those preparatory schools is to get 
the boys through their examinations, not as a means, but as 
an end. They are therefore all organized on one plan. To 
that plan there is no exception; nor practically can there be 
any exception. The requirements for admission are such that 
the labor of preparation occupies fully the boy's study hours. 
He is not overworked, perhaps, but when his tasks are done he 
has no more leisure than is good for play ; and you cannot take 
a healthy boy the moment he leaves school and set him down 
before tutors in German and French. If you do, he will soon 
cease to be a healthy boy ; and he will not learn German or 
French. Over-education is a crime against youth. But Har- 
vard College says: "We require such and such things for ad- 
mission to our course." First and most emphasized among 
them are Latin and Greek. The academies accordingly teach 
Latin and Greek ; and they teach it in the way to secure admis- 
sion to the college. Hence, because of this action of the col- 
lege, the schools do not exist in this country in which my 
children can learn what my experience tells me it is all essen- 
tial they should know. They cannot both be fitted for college 
and taught the modern languages. And when I say " taught 
the modern languages," I mean taught them in the world's 
sense of the word, and not in the college sense of it, as prac- 
tised both in my time and now. And here let me not be mis- 
understood, and confronted with examination papers. I am 
talking of really knowing something. I do not want my 
children to get a smattering knowledge of French and of Ger- 



1 6 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

man, such a knowledge as was and now is given to boys of 
Latin and Greek; but I do want them to be taught to write 
and to speak those languages, as well as to read them, — in a 
word, so to master them that they will thereafter be tools al- 
ways ready to the hand. This requires labor. It is a thing 
which cannot be picked up by the wayside, except in the 
countries where the languages are spoken. If academies in 
America are to instruct in this way, they must devote them- 
selves to it. But the college requires all that they can well 
undertake to do. The college absolutely insists on Latin and 
Greek. 

Latin I will not stop to contend over. That is a small mat- 
ter. Not only is it a comparatively simple language, but, apart 
from its literature, — for which I cannot myself profess to have 
any great admiration, — it has its modern uses. Not only is it 
directly the mother tongue of all southwestern Europe, but it 
has by common consent been adopted in scientific nomencla- 
ture. Hence, there are reasons why the educated man should 
have at least an elementary knowledge of Latin. That knowl- 
edge also can be acquired with no great degree of labor. To 
master the language would be another matter ; but in these 
days few think of mastering it. How many students during 
the last thirty years have graduated from Harvard who could 
read Horace and Tacitus and Juvenal, as numbers now read 
Goethe and Mommsen and Heine? If there have been ten, I 
do not believe there have been a score. This it is to acquire 
a language ! A knowledge of its rudiments is a wholly different 
thing; and with a knowledge of the rudiments of Latin as a 
requirement for admission to college I am not here to quarrel. 
Not so Greek. The study of Greek, and I speak from the un- 
mistakable result of my own individual experience in active 
life, as well as from that of a long-continued family experience 
which I shall presently give, — the study of Greek in the way 
it is traditionally insisted upon, as the chief requirement to en- 
tering college, is a positive educational wrong. It has already 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 1 7 

wrought great individual and general injury, and is now work- 
ing it. It has been productive of no compensating advantage. 
It is a superstition. 

But before going further I wish to emphasize the limitations 
under which I make this statement. I would not be misun- 
derstood. I am speaking not at all of Greek really studied 
and lovingly learned. Of that there cannot well be two 
opinions. I have already said that it is the basis of the finest 
scholarship. I have in mind only the Greek traditionally 
insisted upon as the chief requirement to entering College, — 
the Greek learned under compulsion by nine men at least out 
of each ten who are graduated. It is that quarter-acquired 
knowledge, and that only, of which I insist that it is a super- 
stition, and educational wrong. Nor can it ever be anything 
else. It is a mere penalty on going to college. 

I am told that when thoroughly studied Greek becomes a 
language delightfully easy to learn. I do not know how this 
may be ; but I do know that when learned as a college require- 
ment it is most difficult, — far more difficult than Latin. 
Unlike Latin, also, Greek, partially acquired, has no modern 
uses. Not only is it a dead tongue, but it bears no immediate 
relation to any living speech or literature of value. Like all 
rich dialects, it is full of anomalies ; and accordingly its 
grammar is the delight of grammarians, and the despair of 
every one else. When I was fitted for college, the study of 
Greek took up at least one half of the last three years devoted 
to active preparation. In memory it looms up now, through 
the long vista of years, as the one gigantic nightmare of youth, 
— and no more profitable than nightmares are wont to be. 
Other school-day tasks sink into insignificance beside it. 
When we entered college we had all of us the merest super- 
ficial knowledge of the language, — a knowledge measured by 
the ability to read at sight a portion of Xenophon, a little of 
Herodotus, and a book or two of the Iliad. It was just enough 
to enable us to meet the requirements of the examination. In 



18 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

all these respects, my inquiries lead me to conclude that what 
was true then is even more true now. In the vast majority ot 
cases, this study of Greek was looked upon by parent and stu- 
dent as a mere college requirement; and the instructor taught 
it as such. It was never supposed for an instant that it would 
be followed up. On the contrary, if it was thought of at all, 
instead of rather taken as a matter of course, it was thought of 
very much as a similar amount of physical exercise with dumb- 
bells or parallel-bars might be thought of, — as a thing to be 
done as best it might, and there an end. As soon as possible 
after entering college the study was abandoned forever, and the 
little that had been acquired faded rapidly away from the 
average student's mind. I have now forgotten the Greek 
alphabet, and I cannot read all the Greek characters if I 
open my Homer. Such has been the be-all and the end-all 
of the tremendous labor of my schooldays. 

But I now come to what in plain language I cannot but call 
the educational cant of this subject. I am told that I ignore 
the severe intellectual training I got in learning the Greek 
grammar, and in subsequently applying its rules; that my 
memory then received an education which, turned since to 
other matters, has proved invaluable to me ; that accumu- 
lated experience shows that this training can be got equally 
well in no other way; that, beyond all this, even my slight 
contact with the Greek masterpieces has left with me a subtile 
but unmistakable residuum, impalpable perhaps, but still there, 
and very precious ; that, in a word, I am what is called an 
educated man, which, but for my early contact with Greek, I 
would not be. 

It was Dr. Johnson, I believe, who once said, " Let us free 
our minds from cant ; " and all this, with not undue blunt- 
ness be it said, is unadulterated nonsense. The fact that it 
has been and will yet be a thousand times repeated, cannot 
make it anything else. In the first place, I very confidently 
submit, there is no more mental training in learning the Greek 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 19 

grammar by heart than in learning by heart any other equally 
difficult and, to a boy, unintelligible book. As a mere work 
of memorizing, Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason " would be at 
least as good. In the next place, unintelligent memorizing is 
at best a most questionable educational method. For one, I 
utterly disbelieve in it. It never did me anything but harm ; 
and learning by heart the Greek grammar did me harm, — a 
great deal of harm. While I was doing it, the observing and 
reflective powers lay dormant; indeed, they were systemati- 
cally suppressed. Their exercise was resented as a sort of im- ' 
pertinence. We boys stood up and repeated long rules, and 
yet longer lists of exceptions to them, and it was drilled into 
us that we were not there to reason, but to rattle off something 
written on the blackboard of our minds. The faculties we had 
in common with the raven were thus cultivated at the expense 
of that apprehension and reason which, Shakespeare tells us, 
makes man like the angels and God. I infer this memory- 
culture is yet in vogue; for only yesterday, as I sat at the 
Commencement table with one of the younger and more active 
of the professors of the college, he told me that he had no dif- 
ficulty with his students in making them commit to memory; 
they were well trained in that. But when he called on them 
to observe and infer, then his troubles began. They had never 
been led in such a path. It was the old, old story, — a lamen- 
tation and an ancient tale of wrong. There are very few of us 
who were educated a generation ago who cannot now stand 
up and glibly recite long extracts from the Greek grammar ; 
sorry am I to say it, but these extracts are with most of us all 
we have left pertaining to that language. But, as not many of 
us followed the stage as a calling, this power of rapidly learn- 
ing a part has proved but of questionable value. It is true, the 
habit of correct verbal memorizing will probably enable its 
fortunate possessor to get off many an apt quotation at the 
dinner-table, and far be it from me to detract from that much 
longed-for accomplishment ; but, after all, the college professes 



20 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

to fit its students for life rather than for its dinner-tables, and 
in life a happy knack at quotations is in the long run an indiffer- 
ent substitute for the power of close observation, and correct 
inference from it. To be able to follow out a line of exact, 
sustained thought to a given result is invaluable. It is a weapon 
which all who would engage successfully in the struggle of 
modern life must sooner or later acquire ; and they are apt to 
succeed just in the degree they acquire it. In my youth we 
were supposed to acquire it through the blundering application 
of rules of grammar in a language we did not understand. The 
training which ought to have been obtained in physics and math- 
ematics was thus sought for long, and in vain, in Greek. That 
it was not found, is small cause for wonder now. And so, look- 
ing back from this standpoint of thirty years later, and thinking 
of the game which has now been lost or won, I silently listen 
to that talk about " the severe intellectual training," in which 
a parrot-like memorizing did its best to degrade boys to the 
level of learned dogs. 

Finally, I come to the great impalpable-essence-and-precious- 
residuum theory, — the theory that a knowledge of Greek 
grammar, and the having puzzled through the Anabasis and 
three books of the Iliad, infuses into the boy's nature the im- 
perceptible spirit of Greek literature, which will appear in the 
results of his subsequent work, just as manure, spread upon a 
field, appears in the crop which that field bears. But to pro- 
duce results on a field, manure must be laboriously worked 
into its soil, and made a part of it; and only when it is so 
worked in, and does become a part of it, will it produce its 
result. You cannot haul manure up and down and across a 
field, cutting the ground into deep ruts with the wheels of your 
cart, while the soil just gets a smell of what is in the cart, and 
then expect to get a crop. Yet even that is more than we did, 
and are doing, with Greek. We trundle a single wheelbarrow- 
load of Greek up and down and across the boy's mind ; and 
then Ave clasp our hands, and cant about a subtile fineness and 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 21 

impalpable but very precious residuum ! All we have in fact 
done is to teach the boy to mistake means for ends, and to 
make a system of superficiality. 

Nor in this matter am I speaking unadvisedly or thought- 
lessly. My own experience I have given. For want of a 
rational training in youth I cannot do my chosen work in life 
thoroughly. The necessary tools are not at my command ; it is 
too late for me to acquire them, or to learn familiarly to han- 
dle them ; the mischief is done. I have also referred to my 
family experience. Just as the wrestler in the gymnasium, 
after describing how he had himself fared in the games, might, 
in support of his conclusions, refer to his father and grand- 
father, who, likewise trained in the gymnasium, had been noted 
athletes in their days, so I, coming here and speaking from 
practical experience, and practical experience alone, must cite 
that experience where I best can find it. I can find it best at 
home. So I appeal to a family experience which extends 
through nearly a century and a half. It is worth giving, and 
very much to the point. 

I do not think I exceed proper limits when I say that the 
family of which I am a member has, for more than a hundred 
years, held its own with the average of Harvard graduates. 
Indeed, those representing it through three consecutive gener- 
ations were rather looked upon as typical scholars in politics. 
They all studied Greek as a requirement to admission to col- 
lege. In their subsequent lives they were busy men. Without 
being purely literary men, they wrote a great deal ; indeed, 
the pen was rarely out of their hands. They all occupied high 
public position. They mixed much with the world. Now let 
us see what their actual experience in life was : how far did 
their college requirements fit them for it? Did they fit them 
any better than they have fitted me? I begin with John 
Adams. 

John Adams graduated in the class of 1755, — a hundred 
and twenty-eight years ago. We have his own testimony on 



22 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

the practical value to him of his Greek learning, expressed in 
an unguarded moment, and in a rather comical way. I shall 
give it presently. Meanwhile, after graduation John Adams 
was a busy man as a school-teacher, a lawyer and a patriot, 
until at the age of forty-two he suddenly found himself on the 
Atlantic, accredited to France as the representative of the 
struggling American colonies. French was not a require- 
ment in the Harvard College of the last century, even to 
the modest extent in which it is a requirement now. Greek 
was. But they did not talk Greek in the diplomatic circles 
of Europe then any more than they now talk it in the 
Harvard recitation-rooms ; and in advising John Adams of 
his appointment, James Lovell had expressed the hope that 
his correspondent would not allow his " partial defect in the 
language " to stand in the way of his acceptance. He did 
not ; but at forty-two, with his country's destiny on his shoul- 
ders, John Adams stoutly took his grammar and phrase-book 
in hand, and set himself to master the rudiments of that living 
tongue which was the first and most necessary tool for use in 
the work before him. What he afterwards went through — 
the anxiety, the humiliation, the nervous wear and tear, the 
disadvantage under which he struggled and bore up — might 
best be appreciated by some one who had fought for his life 
with one arm disabled. I shall not attempt to describe it. 

But in the eighteenth century the ordinary educated man 
set a higher value on dead learning than even our college pro- 
fessors do now; and, in spite of his experience, no one thought 
more of it than did John Adams. So when in his closing years 
he founded an academy, he especially provided, bowing low 
before the fetich, that " a schoolmaster should be procured, 
learned in the Greek and Roman languages, and, if thought 
advisable, the Hebrew ; not to make learned Hebricians, but 
to teach such young men as choose to learn it the Hebrew 
alphabet, the rudiments of the Hebrew grammar, and the use 
of the Hebrew grammar and lexicon, that in after life they 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 23 

may pursue the study to what extent they please." Instead of 
taking a step forward, the old man actually took one back- 
wards. And he went on to develop the following happy edu- 
cational theory, which if properly considered in the light of the 
systematic superficiality of thirty years ago, to which I have 
already alluded, shows how our methods had then deteriorated. 
What was taught was at least to be taught thoroughly; and, as 
I have confessed, I have forgotten the Greek letters. " I hope," 
he wrote, " the future masters will not think me too presump- 
tuous, if I advise them to begin their lessons in Greek and He- 
brew by compelling their pupils to write over and over again 
copies of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, in all their variety 
of characters, until they are perfect masters of those alphabets 
and characters. This will be as good an exercise in chirog- 
raphy as any they can use, and will stamp those alphabets and 
characters upon their tender minds and vigorous memories so 
deeply that the impression will never wear out, and will enable 
them at any period of their future lives to study those languages 
to any extent with great ease." 

This was fetich-worship, pure and simple. It was written in 
the year 1822. But practice is sometimes better than theory, 
and so I turn back a little to see how John Adams's practice 
squared with his theory. In his own case, did the stamping 
of those Greek characters upon his tender mind and vigorous 
memory enable him at a later period " to study that language 
to any extent with great ease " ? Let us see. On the 9th of 
July, 181 3, the hard political wrangles of their two lives being 
over, and in the midst of the second war with Great Britain, 
I find John Adams thus writing to Thomas Jefferson, — and I 
must confess to very much preferring John Adams in his easy 
letter-writing undress, to John Adams on his dead-learning 
stilts ; he seems a wiser, a more genuine man. He is answer- 
ing a letter from Jefferson, who had in the shades of Monticello 
been reviving his Greek: — 

"Lord ! Lord ! what can I do with so much Greek? When I was 



24 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

of your age, young man, that is, seven or eight years ago [he was then 
nearly seventy-nine, and his correspondent a little over seventy], I felt 
a kind of pang of affection for one of the flames of my youth, and again 
paid my addresses to Isocrates and Dionysius Halicarnassensis, etc., 
etc., etc. I collected all my lexicons and grammars, and sat down to 
Ilepl crvvOeo-ews ovofxarow. In this way I amused myself for some time, 
but I found that if I looked a word to-day, in less than a week I had 
to look it again. It was to little better purpose than writing letters on 
a pail of water." 

This certainly is not much like studying Greek " to any ex- 
tent with great ease." But I have not done with John Adams 
yet. A year and one week later I find him again writing to 
Jefferson. In the interval, Jefferson seems to have read Plato, 
sending at last to John Adams his final impressions of that 
philosopher. To this letter, on the 16th of July, 1814, his cor- 
respondent replies as follows : — 

" I am very glad you have seriously read Plato, and still more re- 
joiced to find that your reflections upon him so perfectly harmonize 
with mine. Some thirty years ago I took upon me the severe task of 
going through all his works. With the help of two Latin translations, 
and one English and one French translation, and comparing some of 
the most remarkable passages with the Greek, I labored through the 
tedious toil. My disappointment was very great, my astonishment was 
greater, and my disgust was shocking. Two things only did I learn 
from him. First, that Franklin's ideas of exempting husbandmen and 
mariners, etc., from the depredations of war were borrowed from him ; 
and, second, that sneezing is a cure for the hiccough. Accordingly, I 
have cured myself and all my friends of that provoking disorder, for 
thirty years, with a pinch of snuff." 1 

As a sufficiently cross-examined witness on the subject of 
Greek literature, I think that John Adams may now quit the 
stand. 

More fortunate than his father, John Quincy Adams passed 
a large part of his youth in Europe. There, in the easy 

1 John Adams's Works, vol. x pp. 49, 102. 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 2$ 

way a boy does, he picked up those living languages so in- 
estimably valuable to him in that diplomatic career which 
subsequently was no less useful to his country than it was hon- 
orable to himself. Presently he came home, and, acquiring 
his modicum of Greek, graduated at Harvard in the class of 
1788. Then followed his long public life, stretching through 
more than half a century. I would, for the sake of my argu- 
ment, give much could I correctly weigh what he owed during 
that public life to the living languages he had picked up in 
Europe, against what he owed to the requirements of Harvard 
College. Minister at the Hague, at Berlin, and at St. Peters- 
burg, negotiator at Ghent, his knowledge of living tongues 
enabled him to initiate the diplomatic movement which re- 
stored peace to his country. At St. Petersburg he at least 
was not tongue-tied. Returning to America, for eight years 
he was the head of the State Department, and probably the 
single member of the Government who, without the assistance 
of an interpreter, could hold ready intercourse with the repre- 
sentatives of other lands. Meanwhile, so far as Greek was 
concerned, I know he never read it ; and I suspect that, labor- 
loving as he was, he never could read it. He could with the 
aid of a lexicon puzzle out a phrase when it came in his way, 
but from original sources he knew little or nothing of Greek 
literature. It would have been better for him if he had also 
dropped his Latin. I have already said that the display of 
cheap learning made the American oration of fifty years ago a 
national humiliation; it was bedizened with classic tinsel. In 
this respect John Ouincy Adams shared to the full in the 
affectation of his time. Ready, terse, quick at parry and 
thrust in his native tongue, speaking plainly and directly to 
the point, with all his resources at his immediate command, 
— I think I may say he never met his equal in debate. Yet 
when in lectures and formal orations he mounted the classic 
high-horse and modelled himself on Demosthenes and Cicero, 
he became a poor imitator. As an imitator he was as bad as 



26 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

Chatham. More could not be said. That much he owed to 
Harvard College, and its little Latin and less Greek. 

But I must pass on to the third generation. Fortunate like 
his father, Charles Francis Adams spent some years of his 
boyhood in Europe, and in many countries of Europe ; so that 
at six years old he could talk, as a child talks, in no less than 
six different tongues. Greek was not among them. Return- 
ing to America he too fitted for Harvard, and in so doing made 
a bad exchange ; for he easily got rid forever of the German 
speech, and with much labor acquired in place thereof the 
regulation allowance of Greek. He was graduated in the class 
of 1825. After graduation, having more leisure than his father 
or grandfather, — that is, not being compelled to devote him- 
self to an exacting profession, — he, as the phrase goes, "kept 
up his Greek." That is, he occupied himself daily, for an hour 
or so, with the Greek masterpieces, puzzling them laboriously 
out with the aid of grammar and lexicon. He never acquired 
any real familiarity with the tongue ; for I well remember that 
when my turn at the treadmill came, and he undertook to aid 
me at my lessons, we were very much in the case of a boy 
who was nearly blind, being led by a man who could only 
very indistinctly see. Still he for years " kept up his Greek," 
and was on the examining-committee of the College. And 
now, looking back, I realize at what a sad cost to himself 'he 
did this ; for in doing it he lost the step of his own time. Had 
he passed those same morning hours in keeping himself 
abreast with modern thought in those living tongues he had 
acquired in his infancy, and allowed his classics to rest undis- 
turbed on his library shelves, he would have been a wiser, a 
happier, and a far more useful man. But modern thought 
(apart from politics), modern science, modern romance and 
modern poetry soon ceased to have any charm for him. Nev- 
ertheless, he did not wholly lose the more useful lessons of his 
infancy. For years, as I have said, he officiated on the Greek 
examining-committee of the College ; but at last the time came 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 27 

when his country needed a representative on a board of inter- 
national arbitration. Then he laid his lexicon and grammar 
aside forever, and the almost forgotten French of his boyhood 
was worth more — a thousand-fold more — to him and his 
country than all the concentrated results of the wasted leisure 
hours of his maturer life. 

I come now to the fourth generation, cutting deep into the 
second century. My father had four sons. We were all 
brought up on strict traditional principles, the special family 
experience being carefully ignored. We went to the Latin 
schools, and there wasted the best hours of our youth over the 
Greek grammar, — hours during which we might have been 
talking French and German, — and presently we went to Har- 
vard. When we got there we dropped Greek, and with one 
voice we have all deplored the irreparable loss we sustained in 
being forced to devote to it that time and labor which, other- 
wise applied, would have produced results now invaluable. 
One brother, since a Professor at Harvard, whose work here 
was not without results, wiser than the rest, went abroad after 
graduation, and devoted two years to there supplying, imper- 
fectly and with great labor, the more glaring deficiencies of 
his college training. Since then the post-graduate knowl- 
edge thus acquired has been to him an indispensable tool of 
his trade. Sharing in the modern contempt for a superficial 
learning, he has not wasted his time over dead languages 
which he could not hope thoroughly to master. Another of 
the four, now a Fellow of the University, has certainly made no 
effort to keep up his Greek. When, however, his sons came 
forward, a fifth generation to fit for college, looking back over 
his own experience as he watched them at their studies, his 
eyes were opened. Then in language certainly not lacking in 
picturesque vigor, but rather profane than either classical or 
sacred, he expressed to me his mature judgment. While he 
looked with inexpressible self-contempt on that worthless 
smatter of the classics which gave him the title of an educated 



28 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

man, he declared that his inability to follow modern thought 
in other tongues, or to meet strangers on the neutral ground 
of speech, had been and was to him a source of life-long 
regret and the keenest mortification. In obedience to the 
stern behest of his Alma Mater he then proceeded to sacrifice 
his children to the fetich. 

My own experience I have partly given. It is unnecessary 
for me to repeat it. Speaking in all moderation, I will merely 
say that, so far as I am able to judge, the large amount of my 
youthful time devoted to the study of Greek, both in my school 
and college life, was time as nearly as possible thrown away. 
I suppose I did get some discipline out of that boyish martyr- 
dom. I should have got some discipline out of an "equal num- 
ber of hours spent on a treadmill. But the discipline I got 
for the mind out of the study of Greek, so far as it was carried 
and in the way in which it was pursued in my case, was very 
much such discipline as would be acquired on the treadmill 
for the body. I do not think it was any higher or any more 
intelligent. Yet I studied Greek with patient fidelity ; and 
there are not many modern graduates who can say, as I can, 
that they have, not without enjoyment, read the Iliad through 
in the original from its first line to its last. But I read it ex- 
actly as some German student, toiling at English, might read 
Shakespeare or Milton. As he slowly puzzled them out, an 
hundred lines in an hour, what insight would he get into the 
pathos, the music and the majesty of Lear or of the Paradise 
Lost? What insight did I get into Homer? And then they 
actually tell me to my face that unconsciously, through the 
medium of a grammar, a lexicon and Felton's Greek Reader, 
the subtile spirit of a dead literature was and is infused into a 
parcel of boys ! 

So much for what my Alma Mater gave me. In these days 
of repeating-rifles, she sent me and my classmates out into 
the strife equipped with shields and swords and javelins. We 
were to grapple with living questions through the medium of 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 29 

dead languages. It seems to me I have heard, somewhere else, 
of a child's cry for bread being answered with a stone. But on 
this point I do not like publicly to tell the whole of my own 
experience. It has been too bitter, too humiliating. Repre- 
senting American educated men in the world's industrial gath- 
erings, I have occupied a position of confessed inferiority. I 
have not been the equal of my peers. It was the world's 
Congress of to-day, and Latin and Greek were not current 
money there. 

Such is a family and individual experience covering a cen- 
tury and a half. With that experience behind me, I have sons 
of my own coming forward. I want them to go to college, — 
to Harvard College ; but I do not want them to go there by 
the path their fathers trod. It seems to me that four genera- 
tions ought to suffice. Neither is my case a single one. I am, 
on the contrary, one of a large class in the community, very 
many of whom are more imbued than I with the scientific and 
thorough spirit of the age. As respects our children, the 
problem before us is a simple one, and yet one very difficult 
of practical solution. We want no more classical veneer. 
Whether on furniture or in education, we do not admire 
veneer. Either impart to our children the dead languages 
thoroughly or the living languages thoroughly; or, better 
yet, let them take their choice of either. This is just what 
the colleges do not do. On the contrary, Harvard stands 
directly in the way of what a century-and-a-half 's experience 
tells me is all important. 

I have already referred to the way in which this comes about. 
It was Polonius, I think, who suggested to his agent that he 
should "by indirections find directions out; " and that is what 
Harvard does with our youth. Economically speaking, the 
bounty or premium put upon Greek is so heavy that it 
amounts to a prohibition of other things. To fit a boy for 
college is now no small task. The doing so is a specialty in 
itself; for the standard has been raised, and the list of require- 



3<3 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

ments increased. Candidates for admission to the Freshman 
Class must know a little of a good many things. To acquire 
this multifarious fractional knowledge takes a great deal of 
time. To impart it in just the proper quantities, and in such 
a way that it shall all be on hand and ready for exhibition on 
a given day, affords the teachers of the academies, as I am 
given to understand, all the occupation they crave. The re- 
quirements being thus manifold, it is a case of expressio unius, 
exchtsio alterius. Accordingly, one thing crowding another 
out, there does not exist, so far as I am able to learn, a single 
school in the country which will at the same time prepare my 
sons for college, and for what I, by long and hard experience, 
perfectly well know to be the life actually before them. The 
simple fact is that the college faculty tell me that I do not 
know what a man really needs to enable him to do the edu- 
cated work of modern life well; and I, who for twenty years 
have been engaged in that work, can only reply that the mem- 
bers of the faculty are laboring under a serious misappre- 
hension as to what life is. It is a something made up, not 
of theories, but of facts, — and of confoundedly hard facts, at 
that. 

The situation has its comical side, and is readily suggestive 
of sarcasm. Unfortunately, it has its serious side also. It is 
not so very easy to elude the fetich. Of course, where means 
are ample it is possible to improvise an academy through 
private instruction. But the contact with his equals in the 
class and on the playground is the best education a boy ever 
gets, — better than a rudimentary knowledge of Greek, even. 
According to my observation, to surround children with tutors 
at home is simply to emasculate them. Then, again, they can 
be sent to Europe and to the schools there. But that way 
danger lies. For myself, whatever my children are not, I want 
them to be Americans. If they go to Europe, I must go with 
them ; but as the people of modern Europe do not speak 
Greek and Latin, in which learned tongues alone I am theoreti- 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 3 I 

cally at home, a sojourn of some years in a foreign academic 
town, though as a remedy it may be effective, yet at the time 
of life at which those of my generation have now unhappily 
arrived, it partakes also of the heroic. 

Such is the dilemma in which I find myself placed. Such is 
the common dilemma in which all those are placed who see 
and feel the world as I have seen and felt it. We are the 
modernists and a majority ; but in the eyes of the classicists 
we are, I fear, a vulgar and contemptible majority. Yet I 
cannot believe that this singular condition of affairs will last a 
great while longer. The measure of reform seems very simple 
and wholly reasonable. The modernist does not ask to have 
German and French substituted for Greek and Latin as the 
basis of all college education. I know that he is usually rep- 
resented as seeking this change, and of course I shall be 
represented as seeking it. This, however, is merely one of 
those wilful misrepresentations to which the more disingenu- 
ous defenders of vested interests always have recourse. So 
far from demanding that Greek and Latin be driven out and 
French and German substituted for them, we do not even ask 
that the modern languages be put on an equal footing with 
the classic. Recognizing, as every intelligent modernist must, 
that the command of several languages, besides that which is 
native to him, is essential to a liberally educated man, — recog- 
nizing this fundamental fact, those who feel as I feel would by 
no means desire that students should be admitted to the college 
who could pass their examinations in German and French, 
instead of Greek and Latin. We are willing — at least I 
am willing — to concede a preference, and a great preference, 
to the dead over the living, to the classic over the modern. 
All I would ask, would be that the preference afforded to the 
one should no longer, as now, amount to the practical prohi- 
bition of the other. I should not even wish for instance, that, 
on the present basis of real familiarity, Greek should count 
against French and German combined as less than three counts 



32 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

against one. This, it seems to me, should afford a sufficient 
bounty on Greek. In other words, the modernist asks of the 
college to change its requirements for admission only in this 
wise : Let it say to the student who presents himself, " In 
what languages, besides Latin and English, — those are re- 
quired of all, — in what other languages — Hebrew, Greek, 
German, French, Spanish, or Italian — will you be examined?" 
If the student replies, " In Greek," so be it, — let him be ex- 
amined in that alone; and if, as now, he can stumble through 
a few lines of Xenophon or Homer, and render some simple 
English sentences into questionable Greek, let that suffice. 
As respects languages, let him be -pronounced fitted for a col- 
lege course. If, however, instead of offering himself in the 
classic, he offers himself in the modern tongues, then, though 
no mercy be shown him, let him at least no longer be turned 
contemptuously away from the college doors ; but, instead 
of the poor, quarter-knowledge, ancient and modern, now 
required, let him be permitted to pass such an examination 
as will show that he has so mastered two languages besides his 
own that he can go forward in his studies, using them as 
working tools. Remember that, though we are modernists, we 
are yet your fellow-students; and so we pray you to let us 
and our children sit at the common table of the Alma Mater, 
even though it be below the salt. 

That an elementary knowledge of one dead language should 
count as equal to a thorough familiarity with two living lan- 
guages ought, I submit, to be accepted as a sufficient educa- 
tional bounty on the former, and brand of inferiority on 
the latter. The classicist should in reason ask for no more. 
He should not insist that his is the only, as well as the royal, 
road to salvation. Meanwhile the modernist would be per- 
fectly satisfied with recognition on any terms. He most cer- 
tainly does not wish to see modern languages, or indeed 
any other subject, taught in preparatory schools as Greek 
was taught in them when we were there, or as it is taught 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 33 

in them now, — I mean as a mere college requirement. Be- 
lieving, as the scientific modernist does, that a little knowl- 
edge is a contemptible thing, he does not wish to see the 
old standard of examinations in the dead languages any- 
longer applied to the living. On the contrary, we wish 
to see the standard raised; and we know perfectly well 
that it can be raised. If a youth wants to enter college on 
the least possible basis of solid acquirement, by all means let 
Greek, as it is, be left open for him. If, however, he takes the 
modern languages, let him do so with the distinct understand- 
ing that he must master those languages. After he enters the 
examination-room no word should be uttered except in the 
language in which he is there to be examined. 

Consider now, for a moment, what would be the effect on the 
educational machinery of the country of this change in the col- 
lege requirements. The modern, scientific, thorough spirit 
would at once assert itself. Up to this time it has, by that 
tradition and authority which are so powerful in things educa- 
tional, been held in subjection. Remove the absolute protec- 
tion which hitherto has been and now is accorded to Greek, 
and many a parent would at once look about for a modern, as 
opposed to a classical, academy. To meet the college require- 
ments, that academy would have to be one in which no English 
word would be spoken in the higher recitation-rooms. Every 
school exercise would be conducted by American masters pro- 
ficient in the foreign tongues. The scholars would have to 
learn languages by hearing them and talking them. The nat- 
ural law of supply and demand would then assert itself. The 
demand is now a purely artificial one, but the supply of Greek 
and Latin, such as it is, comes in response to it. Once let a 
thorough knowledge of German and French and Spanish be as 
good tender at the college-door as a fractional knowledge of 
either of the first two of those languages and of Greek now 
is, and the academies would supply that thorough knowledge 
also. If the present academies did not supply it, other and 
better academies would. 



34 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

But I have heard it argued that in order to attain the ends I 
have in view no such radical change as that involved in drop- 
ping Greek from the list of college requirements is at all neces- 
sary. The experience of Montaigne is cited, told in Montaigne's 
charming language. It is then asserted that the compulsory- 
study of Greek has not been discontinued in foreign colleges; 
and yet, as we all know, the students of those colleges have an 
ever increasing mastery of the living tongues. I do not propose 
to enter into this branch of the discussion. I do not profess 
to be informed as to what the universities of other lands have 
done. As I have repeatedly said, I have nothing of value to 
contribute to this debate except practical, individual experi- 
ence. So in answer to the objections I have just stated, I 
hold it sufficient for my purpose to reply that we have to deal 
with America, and not with Germany or France or Great 
Britain. The educational and social conditions are not the 
same here as in those countries. Our home-life is different, 
our schools are different; wealth is otherwise distributed; 
the machinery for special instruction which is found there 
cannot be found here. However it may be in England or 
in Prussia, however it may hereafter be in this country, our 
children cannot now acquire foreign languages, living or dead, 
in the easy, natural way, — in the way in which Montaigne 
acquired them. The appliances do not exist. Consequently 
there is not room in one and the same preparatory school 
for both the modernist and the classicist. Under existing 
conditions the process of acquiring the languages is too slow 
and laborious ; the one crowds out the other. In the univer- 
sity it is not so. The two could from the beginning there move 
side by side ; under the elective system they do so already, 
during the last three years of the course. I would put no 
obstacle in the way of the scholar whose tastes turn to classic 
studies. On the contrary, I would afford him every assistance, 
and no longer clog and encumber his progress by tying him to 
a whole class-room of others whose tastes run in opposite 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 35 

directions, or in no direction at all. Indeed, it is curious to 
think how much the standard of classic requirements might be 
raised, were not the better scholars weighted down by the pres- 
ence of the worse. But while welcoming the classicist, why 
not also welcome the modernist? Why longer say, "By 
this one avenue only shall the college be approached " ? Why 
this narrow, this intolerant spirit? After all, the university is a 
part of the machinery of the world in which we live ; and, as I 
have already more than once intimated, the college student 
does not get very far into that world, after leaving these classic 
shades, before he is made to realize that it is a world of facts, 
and very hard facts. As one of those facts, I would like to 
suggest that there are but two, or at most three, languages 
spoken on these continents in which ours is the dominant 
race. There is a saying that a living dog is better than a dead 
lion ; and the Spanish tongue is what the Greek is not, — a 
very considerable American fact. 

Here I might stop ; and here, perhaps, I ought to stop. I 
am, however, unwilling to do so without a closing word on one 
other topic. For the sake of my argument, and to avoid mak- 
ing a false issue, I have in everything I have said, as between 
the classic and modern languages, fully yielded the preference 
to the former. I have treated a mastery of the living tongues 
simply as an indispensable tool of trade, or medium of speech 
and thought. It was a thing which the scholar, the professional 
man and the scientist of to-day must have, or be unequal to 
his work. I have made no reference to the accumulated lit- 
erary wealth of the modern tongues, much less compared their 
masterpieces with those of Greece or Rome. Yet I would not 
have it supposed that in taking this view of the matter I 
express my full belief. On the contrary, I most shrewdly 
suspect that there is in what are called the educated classes, 
both in this country and in Europe, a very considerable 
amount of affectation and credulity in regard to the Greek and 



36 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

Latin masterpieces. That is jealously prized as part of the 
body of the classics, which if published to-day, in German or 
French or English, would not excite a passing notice. There 
are immortal poets, whose immortality, my mature judgment 
tells me, is wholly due to the fact that they lived two thousand 
years ago. Even a dead language cannot veil extreme ten- 
uity of thought and fancy ; and, as we have seen, John Adams 
and Thomas Jefferson were in their day at a loss to account 
for the reputation even of Plato. 

In any event, this thing I hold to be indisputable : of those 
who study the classic languages, not one in a hundred ever 
acquires that familiarity with them which enables him to judge 
whether a given literary composition is a masterpiece or not. 
Take your own case and your own language for instance. For 
myself, I can freely say that it has required thirty years of in- 
cessant and intelligent practice, with eye and ear and tongue 
and pen, to give me that ready mastery of the English language 
which enables me thoroughly to appreciate the more subtile 
beauties of the English literature. I fancy that it is in our 
native tongue alone, or in some tongue in which we have 
acquired as perfect a facility as we have in our native tongue, 
that we ever detect those finer shades of meaning, that hap- 
pier choice of words, that more delicate flavor of style, 
which alone reveal the master. Many men here, for in- 
stance, who cannot speak French or German fluently, can read 
French and German authors more readily than any living man 
can read Greek, or than any, outside of a few college profes- 
sors, can read Latin ; yet they cannot see in the French or 
German masterpieces what those can see there who are to the 
language born. The familiarity, therefore, with the classic 
tongues which would enable a man to appreciate the classic 
literatures in any real sense of the term is a thing which can- 
not be generally imparted. Even if the beauties which are 
claimed to be there are there, they must perforce remain 
concealed from all, save a very few, outside of the class of 
professional scholars. 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 37 

But are those transcendent beauties really there ? I greatly 
doubt. I shall never be able to judge for myself, for a mere 
lexicon-and-grammar acquaintance with a language I hold to 
be no acquaintance at all. But we can judge a little of what 
we do not know by what we do know, and I find it harder and 
harder to believe that in practical richness the Greek literature 
equals the German, or the Latin the French. Leaving practi- 
cal richness aside, are there in the classic masterpieces any bits 
of literary workmanship which take precedence of what may 
be picked out of Shakspeare and Milton and Bunyan and 
Clarendon and Addison and Swift and Goldsmith and Gray 
and Burke and Gibbon and Shelley and Burns and Macaulay 
and Carlyle and Hawthorne and Thackeray and Tennyson? 
If there are any such transcendent bits, I can only say that 
our finest scholars have failed most lamentably in their at- 
tempts at rendering them into English. 

For myself, I cannot but think that the species of sanctity 
which has now, ever since the revival of learning, hedged the 
classics, is destined soon to disappear. Yet it is still strong; 
indeed, it is about the only patent of nobility which has sur- 
vived the levelling tendencies of the age. A man who at 
some period of his life has studied Latin and Greek is an 
educated man ; he who has not done so is only a self-taught 
man. Not to have studied Latin, irrespective of any present 
ability to read it, is accounted a thing to be ashamed of; to 
be unable to speak French is merely an inconvenience. I 
submit that it is high time this superstition should come to an 
end. I do not profess to speak with authority, but I have cer- 
tainly mixed somewhat with the world, its labors and its litera- 
tures, in several countries, through a third of a century ; and I 
am free to say, that, whether viewed as a thing of use, as an 
accomplishment, as a source of pleasure, or as a mental train- 
ing, I would rather myself be familiar with the German tongue 
and its literature than be equally familiar with the Greek. I 
would unhesitatingly make the same choice for my child. What 



38 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

I have said of German as compared with Greek, I will also say 
of French as compared with Latin. On this last point I have 
no question. Authority and superstition apart, I am indeed 
unable to see how an intelligent man, having any considerable 
acquaintance with the two literatures, can, as respects either 
richness or beauty, compare the Latin with the French ; while 
as a worldly accomplishment, were it not for fetich -worship, in 
these days of universal travel the man would be properly 
regarded as out of his mind who preferred to be able to read 
the odes of Horace, rather than to feel at home in the accepted 
neutral language of all refined society. This view of the case 
is not yet taken by the colleges. 

"The slaves of custom and established mode, 
With pack-horse constancy we keep the road, 
Crooked or straight, through quags or thorny dells, 
True to the jingling of our leader's bells." 

And yet I am practical and of this world enough to believe, 
that in a utilitarian and scientific age the living will not for- 
ever be sacrificed to the dead. The worship even of the classi- 
cal fetich draweth to a close ; and I shall hold that I was not 
myself sacrificed wholly in vain, if what I have said here may 
contribute to so shaping the policy of Harvard that it will not 
much longer use its prodigious influence towards indirectly 
closing for its students, as it closed for me, the avenues to 
modern life and the fountains of living thought. 



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